Discover July 2023 Wallpaper*: the Design Directory

Welcome to the July issue, our global round-up of the best in design. Our Design Directory features the best new seating, tables, beds, lighting, outdoor furniture, rugs and more. We showcase the most exciting kitchen launches, and visit Florentine brand Officine Gullo, whose products are based on craftsmanship traditions and whose unique home in the city is set within a Renaissance chapel, with an impressive bespoke kitchen in place of the altar. 

Among this year’s Salone del Mobile highlights was Cassina’s ‘Echoes’ exhibition, curated by Patricia Urquiola and Federica Sala. Celebrating 50 years of the brand’s reissues of works by design greats, including Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Franca Helg and Franco Albini, the show also previewed a new collaboration with the Eames Foundation, which will be officially unveiled in 2024.

We take a tour of Achille Salvagni’s renovated NYC townhouse, a seven-storey building transformed into a luxurious single-family home. Wallpaper’s US director, Michael Reynolds, who art-directed our shoot, says of Salvagni: ‘His interiors have sophisticated Italian notes, channelling Gio Ponti, Bertolucci and Visconti. His work has tremendous quality to it, and he knows how to play with understated decadence. He is of another era, a class act. He marches to his own drum, not of trend, but with a unique authentic eye.’ 

Our Space shoot takes inspiration from the curve, as seen in works created by some of the great masters of design – Ettore Sottsass, Mario Botta, Tobia and Afra Scarpa, Lella and Massimo Vignelli, Mario Bellini and Aldo Rossi. Some are still in production, some reissued, some are museum pieces, but all are enjoying the limelight in a set inspired by Gae Aulenti’s apartment in the Altana Palazzo Pucci in Florence. Our pre-fall fashion edit, meanwhile, captures an after-dark 1980s mood – all glitz, glamour and sleek, powerful silhouettes. It was photographed in the Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s new west London outpost Ladbroke Hall, a 1903 Grade II-listed building restored in collaboration with architect David Adjaye. 

This month, we also celebrate Loewe Foundation Craft Prize finalist Tanya Aguiñiga, whose art and activism weave together stories of transnational identity and the US-Mexico border, visit Fendi’s Roman HQ as it sets the scene for a new show celebrating the monumental work of Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, and discuss the reinterpretation of Cartier’s elegantly elongated Baignoire watch. And to finish in style, we hop on a boat to Filicudi to check out Barber Osgerby’s exhibition at Studio Casoli, an art gallery on the Aeolian island (a regular holiday spot for Edward Barber), where the British designers present an overview of how their industrial work regularly merges with craft.

This is a special month – it heralds the return of our original strapline, *the stuff that surrounds you. Interviewed for our 25th-anniversary issue in 2021, founder Tyler Brûlé described launching Wallpaper* as ‘a curious, global, slightly decadent and occasionally naughty periodical with a passion for architecture, industrial design, entertaining, fashion, the Nordic world and plenty of travel’. And I love this about Wallpaper*, the ability to find joy, inspiration and humour in the designed world around us, so it felt appropriate to reclaim our original strapline with the positively democratic use of the word ‘stuff’ for the things that we choose to surround ourselves with. Design continues to enrich and inspire, and this issue I hope is testament to that. Enjoy!  

Sarah Douglas
Editor-in-Chief

The July 2023 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print from 8 June, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today